PLEASE STOP NOISY AUTOPLAY ADS

[Ken Canin]

I did not receive any reply to my last post about this. My last post requesting information on this was not ignored. I am still getting loud, auto-play ads and have not received info on how to turn this off.

It is distracting and irritating to be reading a thread and suddenly for some loud ad to turn on. If this continues, I think many users will be dissuaded from visiting the site.

 

[Ian]

I did not receive any reply to my last post about this. My last post requesting information on this was not ignored. I am still getting loud, auto-play ads and have not received info on how to turn this off.

It is distracting and irritating to be reading a thread and suddenly for some loud ad to turn on. If this continues, I think many users will be dissuaded from visiting the site.

I saw your post and apologize for not getting back to you because I was trying to pinpoint why it's occurring since that's disabled and I put out an email trying to find out why it's happening. Any idea which one is putting the audio out? Is it the top right on the sidebar or the one underneath the header?

 

[Ken Canin]

Just caught it again, top right of the sidebar. Something about Paul Revere. Oddly enough there was a red X over the speaker icon on the ad as if it was muted. Currently, the front page of the forums has seven or eight banner ads, several of them animated (one of which had sound). More annoying than other message board type sites. It's not a good sign that when I tried to locate the ad that was so annoying, I had to scroll through so many candidate animated ads just to locate which one it was.

I asked before how others navigate this. Adaware? Tapatalk? I'm on a Mac, so if the ads are flash maybe it's worse. (Whole site is very slow on a high-end iMac btw).

I might have said this before also, but if the goal of plastering every page with multiple noisy animated ads is to decrease usership to a few hard-core users chatting among themselves, and maybe some others with good adblockers, it's succeeding; generally, though, message-board sites need users to contribute content, thus inducing other people to view the ads. If the aim is just to make a static SEO type site, maybe the design makes sense.

 

[Ken Canin]

One more thing on a related note, can you remove the ads from the middle of the list of posts in a thread? I mean, it's one thing to have flashy ads at the top of the page/thread or the sides, but when reading through posts, it's disruptive and confusing to have huge ads in the middle of the list. For one thing, it's hard to know if the thread has ended at all or if there are more posts.

Also, if you aren't testing this site on Macs you should: I've got 32 gig of RAM, an SSD, and a fairly new 4 core CPU, and the site still slows it to a crawl (probably excessive flash).

 

[Ian]

Just caught it again, top right of the sidebar. Something about Paul Revere. Oddly enough there was a red X over the speaker icon on the ad as if it was muted. Currently, the front page of the forums has seven or eight banner ads, several of them animated (one of which had sound). More annoying than other message board type sites. It's not a good sign that when I tried to locate the ad that was so annoying, I had to scroll through so many candidate animated ads just to locate which one it was.

I asked before how others navigate this. Adaware? Tapatalk? I'm on a Mac, so if the ads are flash maybe it's worse. (Whole site is very slow on a high-end iMac btw).

I might have said this before also, but if the goal of plastering every page with multiple noisy animated ads is to decrease usership to a few hard-core users chatting among themselves, and maybe some others with good adblockers, it's succeeding; generally, though, message-board sites need users to contribute content, thus inducing other people to view the ads. If the aim is just to make a static SEO type site, maybe the design makes sense.

Appreciate you pointing that out and I'll see what I can do to fix that. Also, registered and logged-in users see less ads than non-logged in, so make sure when you're on here that you're at least logged in. That reduces the number for the sake of improving the overall experience.

I will be making changes this offseason to streamline things further, but I'm probably about a month out before changes start coming. But as I said, definitely make sure you're logged in when you're on here, that will make a big difference and I'll see what I can do over the weekend to fix that other issue.

 

[Ken Canin]

I am logged in, I am getting if anything increasing noisy ads. I'm kind of amazed other people aren't responding to this (most likely they are just leaving, or perhaps this only manifests on Macs). If you're that desperate for cash (and these kind of ads will harm the cash flow after a few months) have you asked the Pats themselves? Teams need a good message board, this one is becoming an exercise in frustration.

Adding animated noisy ads to every square inch of a web page is one of those ideas that, I'm sorry to tell you, you're not the first webmaster to have; however appealing it must seem, sadly, it doesn't actually work.